What Is Domain Authority and Why Does It Matter?

Your site’s Domain Authority can be a solid indicator of how much impact you are having online, helping you to gauge how much value that search engines like Google believe your site and its content possesses. Let’s take a look at everything this means for your business.

What Is Moz?

At Sixth City we work with a variety of software programs to ensure that we are doing everything that we can for our clients. We work particularly closely with Moz, a software company that produces inbound marketing and marketing analytics software.

Though Moz offers a number of tools, one of their best is their tracker for Domain Authority, something all site owners should be aware of.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority, or DA, is a number created by Moz that helps companies track their digital presence. The score ultimately helps businesses determine their ability to rank on search engine result pages, or SERPs, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

Experts at Moz state the technical definition of Domain Authority is as follows:

“Domain authority is based on data from our Link Explorer web index and uses dozens of factors in its calculations. The actual Domain Authority calculation itself uses a machine learning model to predictively find a ‘best fit’ algorithm that most closely correlates our link data with rankings across thousands of actual search results that we use as standards to scale against.

Since authority is based on machine learning calculations, your site’s score will often fluctuate as more, less, or different data points are used in the calculation — for instance, if Facebook were to acquire a billion new links, everyone’s PA (Page Authority) and DA would drop relative to Facebook. For this reason, keep in mind that you should always use Domain Authority as a relative metric to compare against the link profiles of other sites, as opposed to an absolute value scoring the efficacy of your internal SEO efforts.”

There are several factors that have the ability to affect your site’s ranking. These factors include but are not limited to: total number of backlinks, your selected linking domains, and more.

But it ultimately boils down to this: the higher the Domain Authority score, the more likely you will rank higher in search engine searches, leading to increased visibility for your site, and, in turn, more sales opportunities.

How Is Domain Authority Scored?

Your Moz Domain Authority is ranked on a scale of 0-100 logarithmic scale. This number can shift based on various factors, but putting an effort into improving your site in various ways can greatly boost your score.

What Is Considered a “Good” DA?

There really isn’t a “good” or “bad” Domain Authority score, but there are some guidelines to keep in mind:

Scores that are considered to be good or bad depend on the business itself. Comparing your score to that of your competitors gives you a general idea of what you may what to change and what may be working best in terms of boosting your business’s digital presence.

To give you a better idea of the score of Domain Authority from business to business, most well-known sites like Google or Wikipedia will rank in the high 90s, if not 100. Smaller businesses have to work hard at obtaining links to make their overall score jump and outshine competitors.

All new sites are automatically given a score of 1 to keep the playing field level and fair for all businesses to grow.

So while a DA score of 100 is “ideal,” it’s not obtainable for most businesses. But if you had a Domain Authority of say 20, it’s entirely reasonable that you could raise that to be into the 30s or higher given time.

The Difference Between Moz DA and Moz PA

While Domain Authority provides businesses with a predictive score of their ranking ability for the entire domain or subdomain, Page Authority measures the predictive impact of an individual page.Certain pages, like your home page or highly trafficked product pages, are more likely to have a higher page rank than say, a brand new blog post, or an obscure inner page.

How to Influence Your DA

There are many ways to influence your company’s Domain Authority although it is very hard to do so directly. Moz has made the process of attempting to improve your score very thorough. The best way to improve your Authority, though, is by improving your SEO efforts.

One of the major SEO tactics you’ll want to focus on is link building, e.g., building relationships with other well-known sites with a high, or higher, DA.For instance, if the New York Times – a very authoritative site that as of this writing holds a 95 DA – were to link to your site, you would very likely see a rise in your own authority ranking.Various tactics can help you to acquire solid backlinks, which can include guest blogging, partnerships, donations, news-worthy events and announcements, and more. A digital marketing agency like Sixth City can help you to acquire these valuable links to give your business the boost you need.

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Be sure to check out our other helpful posts from our blog, or contact us today with any questions you may have! We look forward to helping you and your business.